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The Players looks at 40: 'We're an event'

For the 40th time in history, the best field in golf will compete for the most money in the PGA Tour’s signature event.

Instead of candles on a cake it will be tees in the ground at the TPC Sawgrass Players Stadium Course May 9-12 when The Players Championship enters its fifth decade.

The tournament began in 1974 in the heat of a late Georgia summer, 22 days after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. The Players visited Texas and South Florida in the next two years before former PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman realized the best model — like the Masters Tournament at the Augusta National Golf Club — would be to build a distinctive, challenging course for the best players in the world and then stay put.

Beman came to that conclusion after the second Players in 1975. Through a series of business moves that proved highly lucrative for both the Tour and the region, he settled on the First Coast for the tournament, the course and the Tour’s headquarters.

That combination has been a winning formula for an event that is now seen on international television by an estimated 830 million viewers in 224 countries.

The Players also draws around 100,000 spectators each week who come for the golf, enjoy the party and leave with memories of champions such as Tiger Woods, Greg Norman, Davis Love III, Fred Couples and Phil Mickelson, who blended their talent and guile to tackle Pete Dye’s devilish masterpiece and for one week knew they beat the best of the best.

“We’re getting to a point where we have a lot of history,” said PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem. “In this sport, history is tradition and stature. The Players is at a point where we have a phenomenal backlog of history and champions and shot-making. It’s a good base to grow on.”

Under Finchem, the Players moved to the more weather-friendly month of May, the course was renovated and a stately clubhouse built. Fan enhancements continue to be added or improved each year, making the Players rivaled only by Florida-Georgia as the biggest week on the area’s sports and social calendar.

“It’s elite,” said two-time winner Hal Sutton. “It has continued to elevate its status in the world and I think players cherish being able to win it.”

Another two-time winner, Steve Elkington, said the combination of topping a Players field on the Stadium Course is an unparalleled feeling.

“I won the PGA Championship and I had another [seven] times where I finished in the top-five in the majors,” Elkington said. “But I’ll never have to play any better than I did at The Players. When Adam Scott won there [in 2004] I wrote him a letter and told him he won’t ever have to play any better than he did that week to win any other event and he agreed.”

Lee Janzen won the 1995 Players a year after Greg Norman set the scoring record at 24-under-par 264. The course was made more difficult and a dry period of weather made it run hard and fast; Janzen won with a score 19 shots worse than Norman’s record.

It’s hard to find someone taking more pride in a victory than Janzen does of that title — and he won two U.S. Opens.

“The four days at that Players was the best four days of ball striking in a row of any tournament I’ve won,” Janzen said. “I’m very proud of it, I can tell you that. It’s as well as I’ve played in any tournament and I did it under tough conditions and against the best field.”

Players will tell you that a $9.5 million purse and a $1,710,000 first-place check are nice. But topping the best field in golf is something else.

The Players’ qualifications boil down to this: what have you done lately?

Finishing among the top-125 on the FedEx Cup points list the year before, the top-10 in points two weeks before, winning at some point in the previous two years or being among the top-50 on the World Golf Rankings two weeks before the tournament are the major categories for entry.

There are no pretenders.

“Early in my Tour career, the field jumped out at me the most,” said Jim Furyk of Ponte Vedra Beach. “The purse gets your attention, but the most important thing is the field.”

Furyk said elite players have fewer contenders in the four majors.

“There are guys in every other major championship field who simply have no chance at winning the golf tournament,” he said. “Whether it’s the past champions or amateurs at the Masters, the qualifiers at the U.S. and British Open — which is a great thing they have that chance — or the club professionals at the PGA, who I respect very much. A lot of those guys in those tournaments are just happy to be there. The Players has very few people who don’t have the ability to win the golf tournament.”

The Players Championship’s status in the golf world is still the subject of intense debate. But the Tour has shifted in recent years away from the claim or the compromise of being labeled “the fifth major” and its leaders point out that The Players’ charitable contributions (a record $6.5 million last year and $52 million since 1977) and using the tournament and the course as platforms to promote other causes are what makes it stand alone.

“There’s not a lot of concern here [about whether the tournament should be considered a major],” Finchem said. “We’re trying to have a great golf tournament and a golf tournament that is the flagship for the PGA Tour and represents the different things the PGA Tour is about. ... We have the Champions for Education conference, a Pink-Out for Mother’s Day [the final round], Military Appreciation Day [the day before the first round] ... these are the things we like about our tournament and what we think fans like. It’s not just about the stature of an event inside the ropes.”

The stand-alone philosophy may one day render the “major-or-not” argument moot.

“We don’t want to be compared to four other golf tournaments,” said executive director Matt Rapp. “We want to be compared to the Daytona 500, Indianapolis, the Kentucky Derby. Those are events. We’re an event.”